March 17, 2011

Sales: 1,000,000,000. Conversations: 0

The piece was about Fabreze, an "air care" product from Proctor & Gamble that's about to hit a billion dollars in sales in spite of never having had a single "conversation" (i.e., social media interaction) with a single customer.

I urge you to read the entire piece, but I'm going to quote liberally from Baskin's post (and move some things around)

Febreze isn't creating entertaining "content" for its consumers to enjoy on YouTube, or allowing them to share on its Facebook site their personal stories about overcoming odor problems (I can't find an official-looking FB page for the brand). It hasn't outsourced product recommendations to its users, and I couldn't find a single customer complaint it fixed on Twitter...there's no global charitable initiative or contest to make the world smell better.

No, it's just doing the same thing that Apple does... Selling products that people want to buy.

...I say P&G should pause and try to learn from Febreze's success... It's just as likely that P&G will decide that Febreze needs those very same social media distractions now that it's a big time player, so if we see some silly campaign (or launch of an official FB page) we'll know that it didn't make the right call. I'm sure there are lots of agency pitches on deck to do just that.

Is there an agency in the world that has the guts and honesty to tell a client that the most likely outcome of having a Facebook page, a Twitter account, and a YouTube channel is a very large expenditure of time and energy and very little chance of seeing any measurable return?

Big thanks to Tore Claesson for this, even though he probably doesn't agree with it.

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Ad Contrarian Says:

"Shakespeare was a storyteller. You're a copywriter.""Good ads appeal to us as consumers. Great ads appeal to us as humans."

"Social Media: Tens of millions of disagreeable people looking to make trouble."

"As an ad medium, the web is a much better yellow pages and a much worse television."

"Sometimes success in the advertising business requires sitting quietly and letting clients proceed with their hysterical delusions."

"Marketers prefer precise answers that are wrong to imprecise answers that are right."

"Brand studies last for months, cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, and generally have less impact on business than cleaning the drapes."

"The idea that the same consumer who was frantically clicking her TV remote to escape from advertising was going to merrily click her mouse to interact with it is going to go down as one of the great advertising delusions of all time."

"Nobody really knows what "creativity" is. Every year thousands of people take a pilgrimage to find out. This involves flying to Cannes, snorting cocaine, and having sex with smokers."

"Marketers habitually overestimate the attraction of new things and underestimate the power of traditional consumer behavior."

"We don’t get them to try our product by convincing them to love our brand. We get them to love our brand by convincing them to try our product."

"In American business, there is nothing stupider than the previous generation of management."

"If the message is right, who cares what screen people see it on? If the message is wrong, what difference does it make?"

"The only form of product information on the planet less trustworthy than advertising is the shrill ravings of web maniacs."

"There's no bigger sucker than a gullible marketer convinced he's missing a trend."

"All ad campaigns are branding campaigns. Whether you intend it to be a branding campaign is irrelevant. It will create an impression of your brand regardless of your intent."

"Nobody ever got famous predicting that things would stay pretty much the same."